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New Brood Of 17-Year Cicadas Soon To Emerge On Parts Of Long Island

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NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Naturalists are predicting a big summer for cicadas in the northeast.

As CBS2’s Lou Young reported, the noisy insects were very active in parts of the area in 2013. Experts had a long-rage forecast for where they may or may not surface in the summer of 2016.

The 17-year cicadas will soon emerge from their unusually long reproductive cycle. The ones out this coming summer were conceived in 1999.

But experts explained that they will not be in the neighborhoods that suffered in recent summers.

Entomologist Lou Sorkin of the American Museum of Natural History explained that while there were a lot of cicadas around in 2013, they belonged to a different brood.

“The ones emerging now have been in the ground 17 years,” he said. “That brood is synchronized every 17 years, but it’s not the same 17 years.”

Sorkin said there are 15 major cicada broods in this part of the world, all on a different schedule. For example, 17-year cicadas buzzed and zoomed through the Chicago area in 1973, 1990 and 2007 and will return in 2024. And the brood we saw in parts of New Jersey and Staten Island in 2013 also appeared  in 1979 and 1996, and won’t be back until 2030.

This summer’s brood covers a swatch of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Maryland, with one outlier near Riverhead on Long Island.

It is a big deal because the mating song of the males can reach levels of up to 100 decibels, and they are so numerous they literally get under foot.

New Yorkers will next see them in numbers in 2018, just ahead of a really big brood that is set to emerge three years later in 2021.

Cicadas do not bite or sting, but they make their presence known. And they are actually an acquired culinary taste.

“They’re very good,” Sorkin said. “They’re good with garlic because you can cook them. They taste very good.”

CBS2’s Young was hoping to try some cicadas at the Museum of Natural History, but they were out of them. He got some locusts instead, and said they tasted like pork rinds.


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